I guess I’m into crypto currencies now

I was mad at myself for a long while for not getting into Bitcoin when the price was as low as $10 / btc not too long ago. I guess the main reason why I never invested is because I never fully understood the technology. To be fair I still don’t understand it 100%.

Then came the rise of “altcoins”, the alternative crypto currencies. I got especially excited about DogeCoin. What sets this currency apart from the 100s of other ones?

It started as a joke, “meme” currency and I fucking loves memes

It is dubbed as a “tipping” currency which encourages the flow of the money. The doge community actually donated over $30.000 for the Jamaican bobsled team so they can attend to the winter olympics

Mining is relatively easy even with CPU

With all new crypto currencies there are new marketplaces where you can buy / sell coins. One thing I realized the price of coin is varies wildly depending on how much risk does the seller have to take for a given transaction.

For example: on eBay the price of doge is about £1 / 1000 coins because eBay uses Paypal and Paypal transactions are reversible, while Doge transactions aren’t.

On dogeforsale.com the price currently around £0.6 / 1000 if you buy via UK bank account. The seller still takes a little risk but not nearly as much with Paypal.

And finally there is the cheapest but most complicated way: Buy Doge with BTC. There is absolutely no risk there and you can get a 1000 coins for like £0.42. Naturally I went with this option, which raised an other issue: I have to acquire some BTC. I was using bitbargain.co.uk which is a peer to peer exchange and bought my first 0.5 BTC. Then using coinedup I exchanged them to Doges.

Now for selling i was considering dogeforsale, but got into a price war with some of the other sellers which made the price as low as it no longer worth my time to do it. So I moved on to eBay. As I mentioned selling crypto currencies via paypal is risky. The biggest risk you face is when someone is using a stolen paypal account for the purchase, then later the original owner issues a refund request. There are a few ways to protect yourself though:

Only sell for eBay members with 50+ ratings (100% positive)

Always ask the buyer to send his wallet address from the paypal email address to your email address (so you validate that they actually have access to the email account)

With this I made some good profit, but its still pocket money. I was started looking at profitable ways of mining BTC so I can achieve close to 100% profits. Some people says mining BTC is dead. Well turns out its not strictly true.

I found this cloud mining platform called cex.io which makes it possible to mine profitably with a relative small investment. You can purchase gigahash / sec mining power from them. When you purchase lets say 1 Gh/sec you actually own the hardware behind it (they actually deliver it to your door if you want it). If you don’t want to use the mining power anymore you can sell it back to the system.

The price of Gh/sec is fluctuating (oddly, as I see it correlates to the price of BTC which makes no sense, but whatever), at the moment its at 0.01176013 BTC / Gh. Luckily I found my old external hard drive which held my old BTC wallet with 2.3 BTC in it (talk about found money) and invested a portion of it for 100 Gh / sec. This mining power gave me about 0.02 BTC / day which equals about £7 profit daily. If I convert this to doge that will be around 17.000 doge coins and I can push that on eBay for £14-£17. If I get bored of it, or just want to cash out, I will sell back my Gh and exchange my BTC back to cash.

I’m doing this for about a month now. Lots of research, got scammed a couple of times but it kind of worth it. It is just fun to play broker with these virtual currencies. Yesterday for a little while I was a doge millionaire. Too bad you can’t get a physical, monopoly money-esque version of these coins.